Invisible Character Remover Text Cleaner

How to Use the Text Cleaner

This free online text cleaner detects and removes hidden characters, fixes encoding issues, normalizes whitespace, and strips HTML from any text. If you've ever pasted text from a PDF, Word document, or website and gotten strange invisible characters, broken quotes, or garbled encoding (mojibake), this invisible character remover and text sanitizer fixes everything in your browser — and shows you exactly what it found and fixed.

Step-by-Step

1. **Paste your text** into the input area — messy text from any source is fine.

2. **Select cleaning options** — Toggle individual cleaners on or off based on what you need.

3. **Click Clean** — The tool processes your text and shows the cleaned output alongside a report of what was removed or changed.

4. **Copy the result** — Click Copy to grab the cleaned text.

Cleaning Options

- **Smart quotes to ASCII** — Converts curly quotes (“ ” ‘ ’) to straight quotes (" ') for code compatibility.

- **Remove invisible characters** — Strips zero-width spaces, zero-width joiners, BOM markers, soft hyphens, and other Unicode control characters that are invisible but cause bugs.

- **Normalize whitespace** — Replaces non-breaking spaces, en spaces, em spaces, and other Unicode space characters with standard spaces.

- **Trim lines** — Removes leading and trailing whitespace from every line.

- **Collapse blank lines** — Reduces multiple consecutive blank lines to a single blank line.

- **Fix encoding issues** — Repairs common mojibake patterns like é appearing instead of é.

- **Strip HTML tags** — Removes all HTML markup, leaving only the text content.

- **Unescape HTML entities** — Converts &, <, >,   back to their plain characters.

Common Use Cases

1. **PDF Text Cleanup** — Text copied from PDFs often contains hidden characters, double spaces, and broken line breaks. This tool strips all of that in one click.

2. **Word/Google Docs Cleanup** — Rich text editors inject smart quotes, non-breaking spaces, and hidden formatting characters. Clean them before pasting into code editors or plain-text fields.

3. **Data Pipeline Preprocessing** — Before importing text into databases or data pipelines, clean invisible characters and normalize encoding to prevent subtle data quality issues.

4. **Code String Cleaning** — Fix strings that contain invisible characters causing mysterious bugs — zero-width spaces in variable names, BOM markers breaking JSON parsing, or smart quotes breaking SQL queries.

5. **AI Prompt Preparation** — Clean text before pasting into ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools to avoid wasting tokens on invisible characters and broken encoding.

Tips for Power Users

- The diagnostic report at the bottom shows exactly what invisible characters were found and removed — useful for debugging.

- Zero-width spaces (U+200B) are the most common invisible character bug. They appear in text copied from web pages and cause string comparisons to fail silently.

- BOM markers (U+FEFF) at the start of files can break JSON, CSV, and XML parsers. This tool strips them.

- Use "Fix encoding" when you see patterns like é instead of é — this is double-encoded UTF-8, a common server misconfiguration.

- Chain the Text Cleaner with the Word Counter for accurate statistics on cleaned text.

Why Use This Tool?

This text cleaner runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript string operations and Unicode regex patterns. Your text — which may contain confidential documents, proprietary data, or personal information — is never sent to any server. It's the safest way to clean text before sharing, publishing, or processing, and the diagnostic report helps you understand exactly what was hiding in your text.